Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images
This year’s Cannes Film Festival featured its fair share of star-studded, high-profile disappointments (Die My Love, Eddington), as well as some middling directorial debuts from Hollywood heavyweights (Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water and Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great) and several films which were more enjoyable than excellent (Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Akinola Davies Jr’s My Father’s Shadow, Carla Simón’s Romería, and Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville).
But for me, five releases really rose to the occasion—ranging from poetic family dramas to pitch-black comedies and hair-raising horror movies—all of which I haven’t been able to get out of my head since my first viewing. These are the Croisette-debuting films you need to catch later this year.
Sentimental Value
Norwegian arthouse favourite Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his transcendent millennial coming-of-age saga, The Worst Person in the World (with Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie in tow, yet again), is both an intimate character study of two sisters and their domineering filmmaker father, and a decades-spanning account of their family history, rooted in the cavernous, cracking-at-the-foundations Oslo home they’ve long occupied. It is also, easily, the best film of the year so far, nimbly balancing humor and heft, and delivering an ending which reduced me to a weeping puddle. Watch it for the razor-sharp, expertly modulated script and the sensational performances, including from Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning, and look out for it in the 2026 awards race.
It Was Just an Accident
Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi’s first film since his imprisonment for “propaganda against the system” and subsequent release was shot in secret and takes inspiration from his own incarceration. But unlike The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the special jury prize winner from last year’s Cannes, directed by Panahi’s friend and fellow inmate Mohammad Rasoulof, this isn’t a straight-forward indictment of the system. Instead, it’s a part surreal comedy, part revenge thriller, following a sweet-natured mechanic (Vahid Mobasseri) who, completely by chance, encounters a man (Ebrahim Azizi) who strongly resembles the one who tortured him during his recent, politically motivated imprisonment. Cue a slapdash kidnapping and a quest to verify his identity prior to burying him alive, which brings together a rag-tag gang—a bookshop owner, a photographer, her ex, and a bride-to-be—all of whom suffered at the same man’s hands and have their own notions of justice. It features some truly hilarious set pieces (one involving security guards who have card machines with which to take bribes; another involving the surprise birth of a baby) before building to a heart-wrenching conclusion which lays bare the brutal crimes of the state. It’s as rip-roaringly entertaining as it is blisteringly urgent.
Alpha
Every Cannes needs a deeply divisive, female-directed body horror à la The Substance. This year, it’s Titane helmer, Palme d’Or winner, and French national treasure Julia Ducournau’s visceral, hair-raising portrait of girlhood, centered on the titular 13-year-old Alpha (a haunting Mélissa Boros). Set in the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll-infused ’90s, it’s an oblique exploration of the AIDS crisis, in which a pandemic unfolds that turns skin milky white until it hardens to marble and then collapses into ash. When our heroine comes home to her mother (an incredible Golshifteh Farahani) from a house party bearing a spontaneous tattoo, she fears she may have contracted this virus, too. School bullies begin to circle, paranoia builds, and more chaos arrives in the shape of Alpha’s uncle (a hollow-eyed, harrowing Tahar Rahim), an addict who is among the infected. It makes for an admittedly flawed film with a limping, uncertain conclusion, but also one which is bold, twisty, and singular, taking root deep in your mind and consuming you with its swirl of disquieting images and allusions.
Sound of Falling
A strange and beguiling dream of a movie, German auteur Mascha Schilinski’s time-jumping period piece is as much a puzzle to be assembled as it is an assault on the senses that will leave you reeling. It takes place on a single farm, home to an eerie house, a hay-filled barn, rolling fields, and a roaring river, which has, over the course of a century, played host to four girls from four different generations: the little, pig-tailed, endlessly curious Alma (Hanna Heckt), with her austere, early 20th-century dresses; the fearless Erika (Lea Drinda), navigating life towards the end of World War II; the morose Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), growing up amidst riotous, ’70s-era decor; and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), listless and lonely in the present day. Soon, the boundaries between these distinct eras begin to dissolve, and as we move between their lives, a picture slowly emerges of an engrossing shared history, the ever-present specter of death, and the accumulation of intergenerational trauma. At two and a half hours long, it’s a film that, for many viewers, will overstay its welcome, and it frustrates as much as it fascinates with its meandering, unfocused approach, but it’s a remarkable, towering achievement nonetheless.
Urchin
Harris Dickinson, recently of Babygirl fame, steps behind the camera for this highly impressive feature directorial debut: the tale of Mike (a compelling, dishevelled Frank Dillane), a homeless Londoner battling to get through each day. Along the way, he encounters indifferent passersby, good samaritans, and troubled fellow drifters, secures and loses jobs, falls in love, finds friends, and spirals in and out of addiction. Tonally, it’s a total masterclass, which fully humanizes our hero without ever recoiling from his darker impulses, and eschews easy answers in favor of a satisfying, knotty complexity. It’s also gorgeously shot, confirming Dickinson—who has a long history of collaborating with boundary-pushing filmmakers like Eliza Hittman, Xavier Dolan, Joanna Hogg, and Ruben Östlund—as a cinephile worthy of their company. There are some big swings which tip into head-scratching territory, including an ending that doesn’t really work, but as first films go, it’s startlingly assured stuff. Extra points, too, for the film’s brilliant use of the Atomic Kitten classic “Whole Again,” which you’re guaranteed to be crooning as you exit the cinema.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
